McCafferty must remember club game still needs the Lions
HAVING spent most of the season refusing to comment on matters pertaining to the Premiership, such as ring-fencing and the structured season, Mark McCafferty has finally broken cover – only to run into a hailstorm.
McCafferty’s stance that it would be “suicide” for Premiership Rugby’s brand if they made any adjustments for the Lions were given short shrift this week by Warren Gatland, coach of the hugely successful 2013 and 2017 tours, and Gareth Davies, the WRU chairman and Lions board member, who was fly-half on the 1980 tour.
They pointed out that the Premiership chief executive is out of kilter with the rest of the game, with the PRO14 and the SANZAAR nations prepared to make amendments to their fixture schedules in order to buy the Lions a week of preparation time.
A week, for heavens sake, for the best supported team in the sport – one that attracts 35,000 fans to travel to the furthest ends of the earth to cheer them on, many spending a healthy proportion of their savings in the process.
A Lions team that through the stars it has produced over a century has galvanised the game as a whole, and continues to do so with new talismen like Maro Itoje, Tadgh Furlong, Owen Farrell and Conor Murray forged in the furnace of the 2017 drawn series in New Zealand.
The Premiership’s ostrich-like head in the sand mentality completely overlooks the benefits their own clubs, and league, derive from having players who return as Test Lions. They are, as Gatland points out, the best of the best in Britain and Ireland, and return to their clubs with a kudos after a tour like that to New Zealand which has probably played a core part in the increase in Premiership attendances.
Lions Test players like Anthony Watson and Taulupe Faletau at Bath, Elliot Daly at Wasps, Mako Vunipola and Liam Williams at Saracens, add massively to the appeal of the Premiership through their feats at international level.
What McCafferty appears to have forgotten is that club and international rugby are totally inter-dependent, and that one will not thrive without the other.
Having gained a huge concession already from the Lions that they will reduce tours from six weeks to five as part of a new global season structure planned for 2020 to 2032, McCafferty is prepared to hobble them further, giving them zero preparation time before their opening match in future tours, including South Africa in 2021.
My view is that the Lions were completely wrong to agree to change their six week window at the clandestine World Rugby meeting in San Francisco last year that hatched the global season plan.
The tour of New Zealand gave Gatland just five provincial matches – with the mid-week game against the Chiefs before the first Test excluded – in which to select and prepare a Test team to beat the All Blacks.
If anything is suicidal that schedule was, giving the Lions coach next to no preparation time and just two Saturday matches in which to assess his tentative Test combinations against the double world champions.
That Gatland and the Lions emerged with a drawn series under that duress was tantamount to a rugby miracle, and it was achieved despite the clubs refusing to adapt their season once every four years.
Little wonder Gatland raised the spectre of player welfare as he attacked the Premiership stance, citing the tour-ending injury to Ross Moriarty in the first game as a possible symptom of lack of preparation time.
Gatland said that his biggest concern in NZ was arriving on Wednesday and playing jet-lagged on Saturday. He stated: “By doing that, we were opening up players to the potential of injury risk. By taking the field as early as we did in New Zealand, without adequate preparation, meant we were doing that. I look back now and Ross Moriarty’s was a really unusual injury – a back and nerve injury. Was that caused by the flight time? Lack of preparation?
“Club and international rugby are totally inter-dependent, and one will not thrive without the other”
Jet lag?” Davies was equally scathing about McCafferty’s brand protectionism.
“The Lions brand is rather more significant than his to be honest. Look at the 35,000 Lions supporters in New Zealand last year and the millions that watched on TV – you toy with it at your peril.”
He added that the PRO14 are looking at giving the Lions an extra week, and that the Lions board would be asking the SANZAAR countries to move their schedules.
Davies told the Daily Mail: “Everybody needs to play a part here. There seems to be a feeling that everyone plays a part in the compromise, but the Premiership are above that. The thing that baffles me is the aggressive stance. I just can’t believe someone can turn round and say we can’t find a week.”
The reality is that for all its tubthumping, the club game, and the Premiership in particular, already under-utilise significant parts of the calendar it is allocated.
The Anglo-Welsh Cup which ran for 13 seasons before being mothballed at the end of this season was ultimately a glaring failure, undermined by a flawed competition structure and declining support from fans.
Despite being run directly by Premiership Rugby it finished with no title sponsor and little financial reward for those clubs that made the latter stages. For the record it was staged over six weekends every season.
Yet, the Lions must be curtailed to five weeks and are given no preparation time to make way for club tournaments as moribund as this was. It makes no sense.